A young woman named Maryam awakes from a disturbing, violent dream to find herself in a bed in a strange apartment in Cairo, rather than in her dormitory room where she fell asleep. With this
enigmatic scene, Mansoura Ez Eldin begins an eerie tale of a woman cut loose from her world and struggling to reconnect the tenuous links to her former life.
On her own in the city, she can find no way to contact her former roommate who has vanished, or her boyfriend, a journalist who seems to have left no trace of his existence. His phone is out of
service, his employer has no record of him, and even his byline has disappeared from old newspapers she has kept. From Cairo, the narrative flashes back to the country villa of Maryam's wealthy
family, where grief and madness lurked between the cracks of her childhood.
